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Books do furnish a room

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  1. Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra This is a brief novella, well, more a short story dressed up as a novella. It is a romance, but it is also quite clever: “Tending a bonsai is like writing, thinks Julio. Writing is like tending a bonsai, Julio thinks.” There’s plenty more like that. It is the story of a romance between Julio and Emilia, initially two college students. They read classics together, turning the reading into a game and looking for what might be vaguely sexual or a double entendre before they can have sex! It’s a bit flimsy and I found it irritating and pretentious, but it is loved by some. “In the end she dies and he remains alone, although in truth he was alone some years before her death, Emilia’s death. Let’s say that she is called or was called Emilia and that he is called, was called, and continues to be called Julio. Julio and Emilia. In the end Emilia dies and Julio does not die. The rest is literature.” The rest is boring. 4 out of 10 Starting The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths
  2. Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada "Suddenly sober, he says, 'Perhaps there are already many thinking as we do. Thousands of men must have fallen. Maybe there are already writers like us. But that doesn't matter, Anna! What do we care? It's we who must do it!'" This novel, written in 1946, just before Fallada’s death is based on a true story. Elise and Otto Hampel were a working class couple in Berlin. Early in the war Elise’s brother was killed in action. They began a silent protest against the Nazis and the war: by writing postcards. For over two years they secretly distributed hundreds of postcards, on which they wrote criticisms of the regime. They put them in all sorts of places and for two years they baffled the Berlin Police. The case was eventually handed over to the Gestapo, who assumed they were dealing with a group of people. They were eventually caught and executed (by beheading) in March 1943. Fallada takes this story and turns it into this novel. He adds a number of secondary characters. The main characters are Anna and Otto Quangel. They live in an apartment block and we follow the lives of the residents as well. Fallada also follows the police/Gestapo investigation as well. It is the Quangel’s son Otto who dies in action in the novel and triggers the postcard writing. It’s a long novel, almost 600 pages, and despite what Penguin say, it’s not a thriller. Fallada wrote this over a period of two months, he was dying at the time. He had been addicted to alcohol and morphine and spent a significant amount of time in psychiatric institutions. His relationship to the authorities was always ambivalent. “Then he [Otto] picked up the pen, and said softly but clearly, ‘The first sentence of our first card will read: ‘Mother! The Führer has murdered my son.’’ Once again, she [Anna] shivered. There was something so bleak, so gloomy, so determined in the words Otto had just spoken. At that instant she grasped that this very first sentence was Otto’s absolute and irrevocable declaration of war, and also what that meant: war between, on the one side, the two of them, poor, small, insignificant workers who could be extinguished for just a word or two, and on the other, the Führer, the Party, the whole apparatus in all its power and glory, with three-fourths or even four-fifths of the German people behind it. And the two of them in this little room in Jablonski Strasse!” This is bleak, with a few shafts of light and portrays a futile, yet principled resistance against a totalitarian regime. It’s a story still relevant. It’s probably a bit too long, but it’s a great study of human reaction to an oppressive regime. “Well, it will have helped us to feel that we behaved decently till the end. […] Of course, Quangel, it would have been a hundred times better if we’d had someone who could have told us, such and such is what you have to do; our plan is this and this. But if there had been such a man in Germany, then Hitler would never have come to power in 1933. As it was, we all acted alone, we were caught alone, and every one of us will have to die alone. But that doesn’t mean that we ARE alone, or that our deaths will be in vain. Nothing in this world is done in vain, and since we are fighting for justice against brutality, we are bound to prevail in the end.” 9 out of 10 Starting The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey
  3. A Storm of Swords 1: Steel and Snow “The greatest fools are ofttimes more clever than the men who laugh at them.” Martin continues to manage multiple plot lines and lots of plates spinning at once. I am reading a historical book about the women around the Norman Conquest and to be honest there is a certain similarity and it’s just as bloody and treacherous. Gradually there seem to be fewer surprises and some characters have become a bit predictable, but I’m sure Martin is just lulling into a false sense of security. It’s as much a chess game as anything and the dragons are growing. It’s all escapist nonsense, but sometimes it’s what I need. 7 and a half out of 10 On to part two
  4. Hare House by Sally Hinchcliffe “We walked through a landscape bleached with frost, the earth standing hard and frozen. Ice crept everywhere. Even the streams had begun to freeze, ice fingering out from their edges, tombing them over. Yet the cold left me feeling alive, as if we were indeed the only things out there that were still living, the only things moving in the whole landscape.’’ I like hares, just as I like owls. There is a wildness and otherness about them. Consequently there is lots of folklore about them and links with witchcraft and shapeshifting. This gathers together quite a few gothic and witchcraft tropes. It is set in Scotland, in Dumfries and Galloway. There are also a few dour Scots tropes and plenty of weather: rain, wind, snow and the like. Hinchcliffe does capture the landscape quite well. The themes are typical of this genre; mental illness, symbols of witchcraft, hares (inevitably), clay dolls, sprigs of Rowan, ancestral curses and the like. Someone also seems to be wandering about the place writing Exodus 22:18 (Thou shalt not permit a witch to live). “If I hadn’t laughed before, I might have then, except that we had reached the churchyard gates and were standing staring at them. The wind here was wild and gusting, the tops of the trees tossing violently, and for the first time it struck me that walking through forests in a gale wasn’t that sensible an idea. But it wasn’t that which had brought me to a halt, brought both of us to a halt. On the gateposts ahead of us, fresh paint stood stark red against the rain-blackened stone. It was crudely done, the letters crammed in towards the end, the paint running, but it was still clear. Exod 22:18.’’ There is also an unreliable narrator, a single woman, approaching middle age, who has left teaching following an “incident”, some “mass hysteria” in the classroom. The reader learns more about this as the novel develops. She now does online work, writing essays and papers for people. This is very easy to read and can certainly be described as atmospheric. The ending is certainly odd and leads the reader to ask questions about the narrator. Nothing wrong with that but the implications here play on certain negative tropes about women, especially single childless women. I didn’t find the whole convincing (what am I saying!!). And obviously there weren’t nearly enough hares. 5 out of 10 Starting Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra
  5. Woodbrook by David Thomson This is a non-fiction account of David Thomson’s time in Ireland. In 1932 at the age of eighteen he went to County Roscommon to Woodbrook, a somewhat run down big house owned by the Kirkwood family. He was to be tutor to their eleven year old daughter Phoebe. He effectively stayed for over ten years as tutor and later farm hand. This was written in 1974 and seems to be much loved. Thomson writes beautifully and the descriptions of the landscape are poetic. He also goes off on lots of tangents, mainly historical, and I learnt a good deal of detail about Irish history. One positive about the book is that Thomson does outline the full infamy of English oppression over the centuries: famines, evictions, clearances and general cruelty. The accounts of rural life are fascinating, especially the accounts of wakes which were clearly semi-pagan in origin. The Woodbrook estate is in decline and this is very much an account of the disappearance of a way of life. The Kirkwood family had arrived in Ireland in the late seventeenth century and so were still newcomers and part of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. It’s all very interesting, however there are a couple of things that made me take a step back. The primary one is Thomson’s relationship with his pupil Phoebe. She was eleven at the start of the book. Thomson describes how he fell in love with Phoebe and seems to have been effectively grooming her (he was eighteen when he first arrived there). At one point he talks about her “budding breasts”. She obviously also responds to his attentions and it’s all rather exploitative. It’s not Lolita, and it seems like her parents gently cooled it off at one point (when she was about fourteen). It was clearly a totally inappropriate relationship. There’s also a bit of adolescent angst which didn’t go down well either. So, despite the poetic writing, the interesting historical information and the description of a disappearing way of life, I didn’t enjoy the whole for the reason described. I have read many reviews which don’t mention this at all, which I find incomprehensible. 3 out of 10 Starting The Persian Boy by Mary Renault
  6. Hi France. These days I seem to enjoy the long hefty books more than I used to!! O Pioneers by Willa Cather “One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain.” The first of a trilogy, the Great Plains trilogy. This is a fairly early novel and the real main character is the land itself, Nebraska. The title is from a Whitman poem. This is pretty much a novella and farming is central. The descriptions of the land are impressive and work well, the characters are bit wooden. Not a great deal happens until close to the end, but that isn’t necessarily a problem. It revolves around the Bergson family, who have emigrated from Sweden, and their neighbours, who have also moved from various parts of Europe. There are characters from France, Bohemia and other parts of Scandinavia. Each group has their own Church and graveyard. The main character is Alexandra Bergson who on the death of her father manages the farm, looking after her brothers. Many have found this dull and rather boring, but this wasn’t the problem for me. Here is a typical description in relation to the land and the pioneers: “When the road began to climb the first long swells of the Divide, Alexandra hummed an old Swedish hymn, and Emil wondered why his sister looked so happy. Her face was so radiant that he felt shy about asking her. For the first time, perhaps, since the land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.” There is a problem here of course. This isn’t untouched land. It has been lived in for centuries by generations of Native Americans who have now been driven out of it. There is no sense of this and only the merest suggestion with a derogatory reference to a “squaw”. There is a strong female lead and a sympathetic account of a woman running a farm (which wasn’t unusual), but there is also a spot of victim blaming at the end as well. Two of Alexandra’s brothers represent the traditional male point of view: “The property of a family really belongs to the men of the family, no matter about the title. If anything goes wrong, it’s the men that are held responsible… We worked in the fields to pay for the first land you bought, and whatever’s come out of it has got to be kept in the family.” It is well written and provides an account of life on the plains at the end of the nineteenth century and the land itself is a striking and compelling character. For me there were other issues though. 5 and a half out of 10 Starting The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather
  7. A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel “A passer-by hesitated, stared. “Excuse me–” he said. “Good citizen–are you Robespierre? Robespierre didn’t look at the man. “Do you understand what I say about heroes? There is no place for them. Resistance to tyrants means oblivion. I will embrace that oblivion. My name will vanish from the page.” “Good citizen, forgive me,” the patriot said doggedly. Eyes rested on him briefly. “Yes, I’m Robespierre,” he said. He put his hand on Citizen Desmoulins’s arm, “Camille, history is fiction.”” This was written when Mantel was in her 20s and written up for publication in the 1990s. It certainly foreshadows her work on Thomas Cromwell. I have some familiarity with academic writing about the French Revolution from my degree. What Mantel does here is to focus on three of the leading figures of the Revolution, their spouses and families. They are Camille Desmoulins, Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre. Mantel makes a point of using the words of her main actors from their speeches and writings where she is able. This is a lot of book for your money, over 800 pages, but I certainly found myself gripped by it and it certainly wasn’t boring. I had some basic knowledge of the historical events and certainly knew who survived and who lost their heads. It did help to have some background to the political comings and goings. Mantel manages to create fair and balanced portraits of the three main characters, from the pragmatist Danton, to Desmoulins the rabble-rouser to the Sea-green incorruptible himself, Robespierre. You can tell that Mantel actually quite liked Robespierre and over time felt less positive about Danton. (As she says “ I see Robespierre as a revolutionary and Danton as a chancer”) They are all human. But the whole cast is huge. Mantel explains her work thus: “I am very conscious that a novel is a cooperative effort, a joint venture between writer and reader. I purvey my own version of events, but facts change according to your viewpoint. Of course, my characters did not have the blessing of hindsight; they lived from day to day, as best they could.” The historical novel is not as respectable as it used to be. The Marxist literary critic Lukacs argued that early historical novels like those by Scott, Balzac and Tolstoy showed that human nature was not fixed, but changed over time, therefore showing that Revolution was possible and so making it more likely. This is a good historical novel with complex characters and terse one-liners; this one by Mirabeau: “Liberty is a bitch that likes to be f^++ed on a mattress of corpses.” Or as Robespierre says: “History is fiction” Setting the three main figures within the context of their own families’ works well and the work is a telling account of the complexities of the French Revolution. The place of greater safety referred to in the title is the grave. 9 out of 10 Starting The Earthspinner by Anuradha Roy
  8. Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism. by Helen Southworth This is a collection of essays about the work and influence of the Hogarth Press, set up by the Woolfs. There are nine essays all told, all worth reading, some obviously better than others and very wide ranging. There are essays on the following. The poet Joan Adeney Easdale was only seventeen when she was first published by the Hogarth Press. Woolf championed her and published more than one collection/individual lengthy poems by her. The author outlines the tensions between the male poetry establishment and a young female poet drawing references from Woolf’s own writing. The second essay looks at the so called middlebrow authors published by the press; examples being Rose Macauley, Margaret Cole and E M Delafield. It illustrates how the press covered more than just highbrow modernist literature. The third essay covers the Press’s attitude to religious works and their publication. There were few examples of religion being covered but they did publish Freud’s The Future of an Illusion and Braithwaite’s The State of Religious Belief. One of the best essays in the book is on the Hogarth Press and anti-colonialism. Mulk Raj Anand and CLR James both came in contact with the Woolfs and the Press. The Press published works by both authors, including James’s The Case for West Indian Self Government. There were extensive anti-imperialist publications, especially in the pamphlets series. There is an essay on William Plomer who published nine of his early works with the Hogarth Press. He wrote about his experiences in South Africa and Japan. He was gay and there are queer undertones to his work. He is a writer I am not familiar with, so another one for the tbr list. The sixth essay covers Jan Harrison’s translation from the Russian of The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum by himself. It also covers D S Mirsky’s involvement too and looks generally at the different approaches to Russia and the 1917 Revolution which initially was greeted by a great deal of hope and optimism. There is an essay on the marketing of the Press and in particular on the work of E McKnight Kauffer who designed for the press from 1928 to 1939. There is an interesting essay on working class voices. Orcadian poet and socialist Edwin Muir. His wife Willa Muir also produced some interesting writing on women. Two other writers stand out, R M Fox and John Hampson. Hampson, in particular, was another gay author. His first novel was so explicit that even the Woolfs felt unable to publish it so close to the Well of Loneliness trial. I believe it has never been published, but they published his second and third works. 8 out of 10 Starting Bloomsbury's Outsider by Sarah Knights
  9. First review of the year The Whispering Swarm by Michael Moorcock “Part of me was a sceptic – even a cynic, but part of me was also romantic and gullible.” This is an odd one and a little of pre-knowledge about Moorcock and his work does help. It’s the first in a trilogy, although the other two have yet to appear. This is what we would call today a mashup, two strands in the same story and Moorcock becomes his own unreliable narrator. It is part autobiography and part fantasy. The autobiographical part is an account of Moorcock’s early life in London in the 1950s and 1960s. This includes his musical career in various rock and roll bands and of course the development of his writing career. In the 1960s Moorcock wrote a great deal or fantasy and science fiction. Many short stories and the Elric of Melnibone sagas. This is one part of the whole and describes Moorcock’s adolescence and young adulthood including his marriage, children and divorce. All very worthy and it makes up a straightforward piece of autobiography. However there is another strand woven into this which is pure fantasy. Moorcock meets a monk called Father Isidore. He recognises something in Moorcock and takes him to a place in London he has never been before. It is called Alsacia and is near the Inns of Court and the river. It is a part of London which seems to exist out of time and space. It is full of characters from different times, but especially from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Characters out of fiction mingle with real life characters (the four musketeers for example). Other authors have done this: Rowling with Diagon Alley and Doctor Who to name two. It’s all pretty far-fetched and Moorcock has some fun trying to make his young rational self get his head around the metaphysics of it all. The whispering swarm of the title is a form of tinnitus, the voices Moorcock hears when he isn’t in Alsacia. This is all very unusual, there is a plot to rescue Charles II, fights between Roundheads and Cavaliers, Dick Turpin, Buffalo Bill and Moorcock falls in love with a Highwaywoman. Then there’s the monastery and some very old monks and rabbis (very old). There’s also a fair amount of navel gazing and philosophising. I am sure Moorcock fans will love this, but although there is a lot to interest it is rather muddled. 6 out of 10 Starting O Pioneers by Willa Cather
  10. Thanks Madeleine The Twelve Strange Days of Christmas by Syd Moore This is a collection of strange, ghostly, chilling, odd and sometimes just slightly absurd stories. There are twelve of them, but there is no specifically Christmas theme. Syd Moore has turned her hand to a number of things, publishing, working for a Channel 4 arts programme, singer, go-go dancer, performance poet, children’s entertainer and working for an arts organisation. Moore is also the founder of an organisation called the Essex Girls Liberation Front, whose objective was to get the term “Essex Girl” removed from the Oxford English Dictionary. An objective that was achieved. They don’t have a particularly Christmassy theme (apart from a couple) but they are very much within the strange tales genre. The stories fit into a wider series of books Moore has written, the Essex Witch Museum stories starring a character called Rosie Strange, who pops up in at least one of these. Death is one of the common themes. They are a mixed bunch and not nearly as bad as they could have been, although they are a mixed bunch. There is a variation on the Scrooge story which is ok and set in a pub (ok because there is a mention of Jacob Rees-Mogg having a special place in hell). One is set in Cornwall and has a very Jamesian feel to it. The one about the haunted vacuum cleaner is meant to be amusing, although I found the use of the mother-in-law trope irritating. The House on Savage Lane is quite chilling. There are a couple involving cats. One of those has a couple of bumbling and rather incompetent social workers which amused me at least. There’s one involving death as a character in a modern setting. There are some weaker ones as well. They are brief and easy to read and I’ve read worse. 7 out of 10 Starting Hare House by Sally Hinchcliffe
  11. A Clash of Kings by George R R Martin “Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less.” Completed number 2 in the series. It’s long (very long) and complicated and you can have a bit of fun guessing which characters are going to die as the book progresses. As I have never seen the TV series this does actually work. I don’t think there is any point in making an attempt to address the plot, it would take too long. There are a few new POV characters to follow as well. The appendices at the back are very necessary. There are plenty of twists and turns, action, intrigue, battles and even a touch of magic. It’s pure escapism. 7 out of 10 Starting A Storm of Swords by George R R Martin
  12. Now in November by Josephine Johnson “I wanted to give a beautiful and yet not incongruous form to the ordinary living of life,” (Josephine Johnson) Published in 1934, this was Johnson’s first novel (aged 24) and it won the Pulitzer Prize. It is set on a failing family farm in the Great Depression over the period of a year, during a drought. It is written from the point of view of Marget, one of three daughters (Merle is younger and Kerrin is older). There is also mother and father and a hired hand, Grant. The family are in debt and life is a struggle: “This year will have to be different,’ I thought. ‘We’ve scrabbled and prayed too long for it to end as the others have.’ The debt was still like a bottomless swamp unfilled, where we had gone year after year, throwing in hours of heat and the wrenching on stony land, only to see them swallowed up and then to creep back and begin again.” The scope is small, mainly just the family farm, and there is a real connection to nature: colours, weather, plants and animals. This is a description of the high summer on the farm in drought: “In August the smell of grapes poured up like a warm flood through the windows. But they ripened unevenly, with hard green balls all through the purple. The apples fell too soon, crackling in the dry grass,–gold summer apples mushed and brown, and the sour red winesaps with white flesh. The creek stopped running altogether, and the woods were full of dead things–leaf-dust and thorny vines brittle to the touch. It was chill and quiet sometimes in the early mornings, but the head returned, the sun blasting fierce as ever, and the red plums fell like rain in the cindered grass. In places the grasshoppers left nothing but the white bones of weeds, stripped even of pale skin, and the corn-stalks looked like yellow skeletons.” You can taste the dry dust and thirst, but there are other less tangible thirsts. The relationships within the family, the feelings of the daughters in relation to the hired hand, the lack of an intrinsic justice. This is a bleak and tragic book and we see close up the effects of drought and economic depression. It is compelling and rivals anything Steinbeck wrote along the same lines. The prose is profound and poetic and for once I think this deserved accolades, it’s very good. “This is not all behind us now, outgrown and cut away. It is of us and changed only in form. I like to pretend that the years alter and revalue, but begin to see that time does nothing but enlarge without mutation. You have a chance here – more than a chance, it is thrust upon you – to be alone and still. To look backward and forward and see with clarity. To see the years behind, the essential loneliness, and the likeness of one year to the next. The awful order of cause and effect. Root leading to stem and inevitable.” growth, and the same sap moving through tissue of different years, marked like the branches with inescapable scars of growth” 8 out of 10 Starting The 12 Strange days of Christmas by Syd Moore
  13. Stalky and Co by Rudyard Kipling “An Unpleasant book about unpleasant boys at an unpleasant school” (Cambridge History of English Literature 1942). There is a hoary old joke which goes: Question: Do you like Kipling. Answer: I don’t know I’ve never kippled. Stalky and Co is a collection of stories set in an English public school in the 1870s/80s revolving around three boys; Stalky, Beetle (Kipling himself) and M’Turk. It’s actually based on the school that Kipling attended, the United Services College in Devon. It was a school designed for those intended for the army and was often a stepping stone to Sandhurst. Public School stories were a popular genre in late Victorian times, stemming largely from Tom Brown’s Schooldays. There is a good deal of slang in the stories and this can take a little getting used to. It is the usual battle between the boys (aged about fifteen to sixteen) and the masters with plenty of internecine rivalry. The boys are split into houses and there is also plenty of bullying of smaller boys (or fags as they are known). As Edmund Wilson says: “A hair-raising picture of the sadism of the English public school system” It is clear that the education and experience of school is designed to breed the officers and civil servants of the Empire. Indeed the last chapter skips forward to find many of the main characters of the book out in India or Afghanistan, merrily killing and being killed for the Empire and ruling the “natives”. As H G Wells said: "In this we have the key to the ugliest, most retrogressive, and finally fatal idea of modern imperialism; the idea of a tacit conspiracy between the law and illegal violence." It’s pretty much what you would expect from the arch imperialist Kipling, but it has been influential. Indeed there are shades of Harry Potter (obviously no girls or magic), but it is another middle class public school story. 3 out of 10 Starting Woodbrook by David Thomson
  14. She's well worth reading Poppy! Clustered Injustice and the Level Green by Luke Clements "Our legal system generates and exacerbates disadvantage." Luke Clements is a lawyer (professor of law even), but don’t let that put you off, he’s on the right side of justice. He was the first lawyer to take a Roma case to the Court of Human Rights is Strasbourg. This book is about people in society who have multiple legal issues, they are those on the edges of society. They include the homeless, the disabled, disabled children and their carers, prisoners, those in poverty and debt, migrants and asylum seekers, Roma and travellers, people at risk of domestic abuse, people in precarious tenancies and substance misuse. Clements points out that many people have legal problems in multiple areas whether it be in relation to benefits, debt, housing, abuse, social care. Health, child protection, disability etc. Statistics show that those who are poor often have more legal issues grouped together than the rest of society. The law tends to treat these issues separately as discreet and individual problems. Clements points out that this approach is reductionist and it also leads to a stultifying sort of specialism. One of the strengths of law centres was that they had general lawyers who knew a bit about a range of issues and could help clients who had several messy legal issues. This sort of generalism is common in health, after all most doctors in the community are referred to as General Practitioners. In law the state does not like this sort of generalisation and between 2013 and 2019 in England and Wales half of all law centres and not-for-profit legal advice services closed. Clements argues that the best approach to tackle these problems is a systems approach, avoiding compartmentalisation. Clements looks at changes in society and law which have made life for those with multiple problems more difficult. One of these he refers to as juridification, the amount of law which now regulates the lives of the disadvantaged. The volume and reach of the law. An increase in adult dependency in the last forty years has happened alongside a decline in state-funded social care support for elderly, ill and disabled people and their carers. This has led pretty directly to the failure of the domiciliary care sector today which leads to people being stuck in hospital as there is no available care in the community. Clements also has interesting things to say about the proliferation of law relating to identity, especially in relation to its complexity. He feels that being a carer ought also to be a protected characteristic. Clements warns: “Many people whose characteristics are recognised and protected by anti-discrimination laws live with disadvantage, and many experience clusters of legal problems - but many do not. There is therefore a danger in these identity categories becoming proxies through which we articulate and understand social inequalities such as poverty and other forms of social disadvantage.” Clements argues the complexity of these laws can distract from growing socio-economic inequalities. The answer is not more law but a more radical approach to social welfare interventions. Clements also has some very pertinent criticisms of public bodies and their administrative systems. The rise of managerialism and the command and control systems of social welfare these days are based on targets and a coercive culture. Clements looks at the findings of the Munro report in relation to child protection which identified over-bureaucratisation as a key problem. Clements goes on to argue the importance of positive organisational culture and the need to trust key workers to develop it rather than senior management. “When confronted by a cluster of messy problems, key workers have the ability to go up a level of abstraction – and to avoid the bureaucratic temptation of separating, labelling, compartmentalising and then assigning each discrete problem to other offices. By seeing the bigger picture, they are able to warn the individual of future challenges that may be encountered as well as other – seemingly unconnected – action that needs to be taken. They may be experts in one field or another (for example housing officers, social workers probation officers etc) but their USP will be that they are excellent generalists: comfortable working across systems boundaries and making judgement calls as to which battles have to be fought and which can be skirted. They will have a “backpack” of practical experience to draw on: what works, who can be trusted, which levers to pull and when to pull them.” This is a good analysis of how injustice works, often with the help of the law and the first three quarters of the book is pretty gloomy. At the end Clements does point to how justice can be worked for and what is required of those working for it in the public sector. 9 out of 10
  15. Our Spoons came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns This is my sixth novel by Comyns and another virago publication. This is the usual weird and wonderful world Comyns creates, although with much less of the magic realism that suffuses some of her novels. This is set around the time of the Great Depression (written in 1950). It is loosely based on Comyns’s marriage to artist John Pemberton which ended in 1935. The novel concerns Sophia, a young and naïve woman of twenty-one with no domestic skills at all. She marries aspiring artist Charles and this is the story of her life with him and the workings of their marriage until its end. That isn’t a spoiler, it’s on the first page of the book as Sophia is looking back. It’s a first person novel and the concerns are those of an everyday life; poverty, children, unemployment loss, falling in and out of love, the nature of happiness and relationships. Comyns usual wry humour is still there, here is a relative giving advice on managing food when poor: “She cleared her throat once or twice, and said something about poor people should eat a lot of herrings, as they were most nutritious, also she had heard poor people eat heaps of sheeps’ heads and she went on to ask if I ever cooked them. I said I would rather be dead than cook or eat a sheep’s head; I’d seen them in butchers’ shops with awful eyes and bits of wool sticking to their skulls. After that helpful hints for the poor were forgotten.” And the mechanics of pregnancy: “I had a kind of idea if you controlled your mind and said ‘I won’t have any babies’ very hard, they most likely wouldn’t come.” Comyns can slip easily into the tragic and horrific very easily: “about my father eating a wasp in the jam when we were having tea in the garden under the trees, and how he swallowed the wasp and it stung him as it went down and he was dead in twenty-four hours.” There is also the horror of the commonplace, the descriptions of giving birth in a public hospital are shocking, more so because they were common to the majority of women: “Besides being very uncomfortable it made me feel dreadfully shamed and exposed. People would not dream of doing such a thing to an animal. I think the ideal way to have a baby would be in a dark, quiet room, all alone and not hurried.” Again Comyns has a perceptive way of analysing relationships and men in particular, here talking about the reaction of her husband Charles to their new born son: “Charles still disliked him, but in spite of this made some drawings of us together, so I hoped eventually he would get used to him. At the moment I felt I had most unreasonably brought some awful animal home, and that I was in disgrace for not taking it back to the shop where it came from.” Comyns has the ability of drawing a certain type of humour from the difficult whilst maintaining the sense of how awful it is. Here Sophia gets a job: “The first day there, I had to walk to work because we had no money in the house. Charles promised he would bring some in time for lunch, but, of course, didn’t, and I was too shy of the other girls to borrow any, so I became rather hungry and when it was time to leave I waited to see if he would come to fetch me, but again he failed me, so I had to walk home, getting more and more hungry on the way, and angry, too. When I arrived home I saw Charles through the uncurtained window. He was sitting reading with a tray of tea-things beside him. He looked so comfortable, I became even more angry, and dashed in like a whirlwind and picked up a chair and hit him with it. He did look startled. It was the first time I had done anything like that, and he was disgusted with me. I was ashamed of myself, too, but felt too tired to apologise, so just went to bed and wished I was dead.” As you can see Comyns is very quotable. The novel was certainly realistic about the lives of women and it is a story of survival and the things many women had to do to get by. Although I felt the ending was a bit of a cop out, I did enjoy this, but then I am already a fan of Comyns. This is an early novel and not her best, although it seems to be the best known. 8 out of 10 Starting Now in November by Jennifer Johnson
  16. A Game of Thrones George R R Martin I’ve heard that they’ve made some rather obscure TV adaptation of this. I haven’t seen that but I’ve decided to read the books to see what the fuss is about. I will try not to bother too much with the plot because it is rather complex and convoluted. Suffice to say that I have a sense given the first book the best way to sum up all five (seven if you read the printing where there and five are split in two) is by the title of what I think is a recent YA book, “They all Die in the End”. Martin appears not to be sentimental about his characters. Just a few points to make. It all feels a bit medieval, its swords and horses. Martin has taken his lead from much of European history. The Wars of the Roses are an obvious reference point as are many other medieval European conflagrations. Plenty of betrayal, civil war and general rowdiness. The characters have some nuance. There are lots of protagonists (or antagonists if you prefer). And they all have real weaknesses and even the seemingly good ones have feet of clay. There is a marvellous quote from a website entitled “goodbooksforCatholickids”: “In essence “A Game of Thrones” has an alarming lack of just plain good characters” If that doesn’t recommend it nothing will. The whole is brutal and violent with lots of sex (of varying types). There isn’t much more to say without getting lost in the plot intricacies. Martin writes well and I enjoyed it more than I expected to. We’ll see how the rest of the books go. 8 out of 10 Starting A Clash of Kings
  17. The Doll Factory by Elizabeth MacNeal Another debut historical novel and yet more Victorian Gothic. This one is set at the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Iris and her sister Rose are both employed painting porcelain dolls. Iris is noticed by a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Louis Frost (an invented member). He decides she is ideal for his new painting and wishes to employ her to sit for him. There are two other main ensemble members. Silas is a taxidermist who poses small animals and dresses them up. He becomes obsessed with Iris (one reviewer went on to say the novel was stuffed with excitement, but I will avoid all taxidermy jokes). Then there is Albie, a street urchin who finds small creatures for Silas and is fond of Iris. Whatever the backdrop, this is an obsessive stalker novel, even if Millais and Rossetti wander through its pages. Iris is looking for a way out of her mundane existence: “She will never escape. She will never be free. She is destined to eke out this pitiful life, to suffer the slaps and insults of Mrs Salter, to endure her sister’s jealousy, until, at last, some scrawny boy fattens her with child after child, and she spends her days winching laundry through a mangle, swilling rotten offal into Sunday pies, all while tending to infants mewling with scarlatina and influenza and goodness knows what else, until she contracts it too…” Consequently she decides to accept Louis’s offer as long as he agrees to teach her to paint as well. Inevitably there is an element of romance as well. The portrait of the sights and sounds of London is well done and it does feel a little Dickensian. The cover art is also pretty good. However it’s all a bit formulaic and you could transpose it to any modern city fairly easily. What promised to be a fairly open ending is ruined by the epilogue. An obsessive taxidermist and curio collector as the antagonist, we are almost in Fowles territory (The Collector). It was run of the mill and I’ve read too many similar bits of Victorian Gothic. 5 out of 10 Starting The Silk and the Sword: women of the Norman Conquest by Sharon Connolly
  18. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders An awful lot of people love this, and it won the Booker Prize. It is based on a real life event from 1862 during the Civil War: the death of Abraham Lincoln’s young son Willie from typhoid. It is set on a single night in a cemetery. Most of it is brief snippets from contemporary sources or brief snippets from the occupants of the cemetery. The occupants of the cemetery are some of those buried there. They appear to be spirits with some hint of corporeality, who don’t yet know they are dead. Although they all seem to recall the moments of their deaths. There are shades of Bruce Willis in Sixth Sense! Some of these spirits periodically disappear with a flash of light and a loud bang if they realise they are dead. An occurrence called the “matterlightblooming phenomenon” by the rest. Some of these spirits have been around for years and they provide a commentary on young Willie and the president, who visits a couple of times. The idea of the bardo comes from Buddhism and is the name for a transitional state between lives, a stage where these souls are stuck. Coffins are referred to as sick boxes, where they are resting before returning to life. Many of the contemporary sources are actual quotes, some are made up. As well as the serious stuff there is also a comedic element. There are black and queer characters scattered about as well as the inevitable WASPs. There’s lots of playing around with the nature of memory and the subjectivity of memory. Basically looking back and looking forward is mostly guesswork. Saunders drags in all sorts of issues as all types mix together in the cemetery: racism, homophobia, slavery, but obviously also grief and loss. It’s all a bit surreal, but also well meaning. Parts of it reminded me of the Greek chorus, some of it was sheer Monty Python (one of the characters died on his wedding night before consummation and wanders round with a “prodigious member”) and a little puerile. There are interesting aspects to this, but I also found it messy, incoherent and somewhat tedious as well. “None of it was real; nothing was real. Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear. These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth. And now we must lose them.” 6 out of 10 Starting Stalky and Co by Rudyard Kipling
  19. It wasn't a total disaster Hayley, might be worth borrowing from the library rather than buying or keeping an eye on the charity shops People of Abandoned Character by Clare Whitfield Here we have yet another twist or variation on the mythology around Jack the Ripper. This is set in London around the time of the Ripper murders, close to Whitechapel. There will be spoilers ahead as it is difficult to say anything meaningful about this novel without. It must also be said that any writer straying into this area after Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five needs to be really good. This isn’t. One can reach for the usual descriptors like, gothic, atmospheric, visceral. But it is just another variant on an old theme. There are certainly several tropes in play. Strong female lead, nurse marries handsome doctor who turns out to be abusive, violent and secretive. Unfortunately strong female lead turns out to be a murderer (more than one) as well. Of course there is a Jewish doctor as well as this is the East End and Whitechapel. The Jewish doctor is an arranger of abortions, stealer of organs and also a murderer. Strong female lead also has a relationship with a female nurse. The LGBTQ+ element might be a positive if it wasn’t linked to a homicidal protagonist. There is also a Molly House the descriptions of which have an element of farce and somewhat less than wholesome. It felt a little like a parody. The ending was so odd and clunky. The last Ripper victim, Mary Kelly being a part of the previous killings; really? The cuckoo storyline is way too contrived and the housekeeper was somewhat unbelievable. I generally partial to Victorian Gothic and I know there have been positive reviews of this. But I didn’t get it. 4 out of 10 Starting Our Spoons came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
  20. Storyland by Amy Jeffs This is an illustrated history of the mythology of the British Isles; ranging from the Orkneys and Shetlands down to Cornwall. It covers prehistory up to about 1200. Jeffs is an art historian and so the illustrations are good, linocuts and wood engraved prints. The story is told, one per chapter and then Jeffs provides a commentary with the background and origins of the myth in question. Sometimes there is geographical information, if Jeffs has visited the area in question. The whole is steeped in old magic, wild landscapes, giants, dragons and fog (inevitably). The sources are varied, but include some of the usual suspects such as Geoffrey of Monmouth. There are refugees from Troy, giants from Africa, travellers from Greece, Britons fighting Saxons, inevitably Arthur, Merlin (in lots of stories), Joseph of Arimathea, lots of Vikings, Scots, Picts, Stonehenge, curse, treasure hunts, even Nessie. As ever the stories can be brutal and are often magical. Christianity intrudes in the later stories. There are rather good evocations of the landscape. Jeffs speaks about her purpose in writing this: “A desire to share the stories and get people excited about them was the beginning of it all. I was fascinated by how the illustrations in the Brut legend followed the narrative action but they were very concise illustrations and communicated so many elements of an episode so efficiently. I really enjoyed that challenge of persuading people through pictures that these were stories to pay attention to and to enjoy.” On the whole I enjoyed this. I did feel though that some of the rougher edges were taken off the myths and that was perhaps a shame. The language has been modernised and some of the stories changed slightly. It just felt a little sanitised. 7 out of 10 Starting Game of thrones by George R R Martin
  21. Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark Another dry and acerbic novel from Spark. It was nominated for the 1981 Booker Prize, the year Midnight’s Children won. It is set in 1949/1950 and concerns Fleur Talbot, a writer struggling to complete her first novel and get it published. She takes a job as a secretary to Sir Quentin Oliver and his Autobiographical Association. It is an odd grouping who are attempting to write their memoirs. Fleur’s novel Warrender Chase begins to reflect what is happening in the association and this being Spark there is a lot of fun with the interplay between the texts and also two other autobiographies; Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua and Cellini’s autobiography. Fact and fiction are wound together. It’s an odd mix. There is an Ealing comedy/melodrama feel about it and one wouldn’t be surprised to find Alistair Sim or Alec Guinness wandering through the pages. There are also sorts of other references. A nod to A Room of One’s Own and Woolf. Hints of Blake, Spark’s usual irritation with the nature of family, some interesting juxtapositions in terms of friendships: “I don’t know why I thought of Dottie as my friend but I did. I believe she thought the same way about me although she really didn’t like me. In those days, among the people I mixed with, one had friends almost by predestination. There they were, like your winter coat and your meagre luggage. You didn’t think of discarding them just because you didn’t altogether like them.” and a strong female protagonist, one who embraces everything life (and men) throw at her and is not bowed down. As Spark says: "The true novelist, one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story" The mirroring of Fleur’s employer and the main character in her novel (Warrender Chase) is handled well and is quite amusing: “In my febrile state of creativity, I saw before my eyes how Sir Quentin was revealing himself chapter by chapter to be a type and consummation of Warrender Chase, my character. I could see that the members of the Autobiographical Association were about to become his victims, psychological Jack the Ripper as he was.” The portrayal of Bohemian life is effective and funny and there is an element of farce in relation to the manuscript of Fleur’s novel. As always Spark poses lots of questions and the satire is effective. Incidentally the trio of siblings at the Triad Press represent the Sitwells. It’s also brief, a good read. 8 out of 10 Starting Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada
  22. Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky This is traditional sci-fi, a proper space opera featuring starships, stroppy space crew, a variety of alien races, implacable antagonists and some decent world-building. The antagonists are called The Architects and are entities the size of the average moon, they move through space destroying inhabited planets in rather creative ways: “Earth would always be the same now. Earth was like a flower, forever turned towards the sun. An alien flower whose exemplar might grow in some fecund jungle on a distant world. A thing of creepers and reaching shoots, something more than vegetable, less than animal. Earth’s mantle and crust had been peeled back, like petals whose tips formed spiralling tendrils a thousand kilometres long. The planet’s core had gouted forth into yearning, reaching shapes, formed into rings and whorls, arches, curved arms… A hundred separate processes shaped from the living core of the planet as it writhed and twisted, then was left to cool. A flower twenty thousand kilometres across, splayed forever in full bloom; a memorial to ten billion people who hadn’t made it to the ships in time.” The Architects seem not to notice the inhabitants of the planets and weaponry has no effect, so other forms of communication are sought. There are also a few concepts thought up by Tchaikovsky. One of those is unspace, a way of moving between stars. Unspace can only be traversed if the ship has a pilot who has been altered neurologically (a risky process) and the main protagonist is a pilot called Idris. There is a timeline and glossary at the back which is useful. The various factions of humanity are interesting enough and the whole seems to work well. This is the first in a series, so there are plenty of loose ends to be picked up next time. It does take a while to get started, which is inevitable when so much is being thrown into the pot. There are three different points of view in the novel, which helps keep a balance. One of the principal themes of the novel is diaspora and the treatment of refugees, which seems quite pertinent at the moment. On the whole this was pretty good. 8 out of 10 Starting Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
  23. The Winter Guest by W C Ryan I was pleasantly surprised by this one. It is a number of things. It is set in 1921 in Ireland during the struggle for independence. It is a whodunit and a whydunnit, a sort of crime novel which examines the brutality of British Imperialism and the difficult choices people had to make. It is also a ghost story and a vivid account of what was then known as shellshock. The main character is Tom Harkin a veteran of the Great War who is suffering from shellshock after having been blown up at Passchendaele along with his squad. Harkin is an IRA intelligence officer who is sent from Dublin to a small community on the Atlantic coast to investigate a murder near to a country house he knows from before the War. A local IRA unit has ambushed a car and murdered a police officer and an Auxiliary, The Auxiliaries or Auxis were all ex-military and were volunteers working for the British and had a reputation for brutality. In the car also was Maud Prendeville from Kilcolgan House nearby. She is an IRA supporter and heroine of the 1916 rising and also an old flame of Harkin’s. She is still alive after the ambush, though concussed. But then five minutes later she is shot whilst still in the car. Harkin is sent to find the killer and deal with a tense situation, his cover being insurance investigator. There is a good cast of characters and plenty of twists and turns with a scattering of evil Brits and a few dubious aristocrats. There are also a couple of romances (one of them gay). Ryan has based some of Harkin’s experience of shellshock on that of Siegfried Sassoon who when walking around London often saw maimed, dead and dying soldiers on London streets. Ryan also blends in the supernatural elements into the plot well. As he says himself: “The idea that Harkin, like Sassoon, could both experience these terrifying visions but also function on a day-to-day basis fascinated me. It also worked for the setting of the novel: a haunted country house on the edge of the Irish Atlantic coast. Harkin is never quite sure if the strange things he sees there are supernatural, or the manifestations of his own mind. I hope that the reader is similarly unsure.” Ryan has based his characters and story loosely on actual events and has a family history to draw on as his forbears fought against the British at the time. This is a good tale for this genre and the historical background is well researched and portrayed. 8 out of 10 Starting The Whispering Swarm by Michael Moorcock
  24. The Gods Arrive by Edith Wharton “Vance thought of the Cretan labyrinth, of Odysseus evoking the mighty dead, of all the subterranean mysteries on whose outer crust man loves and fights and dies. The blood was beating in his ears. He began to wish they might never find the right door, but go on turning about forever at the dark heart of things.” This is a follow on from Hudson River Bracketed and centres on the same two characters: young aspiring writer Vance Weston and his muse/lover Halo Tarrant. It follows directly from Hudson River Bracketed. With the two books combined the reader spends over nine hundred pages in their company. By the end this is quite enough! All courtesy of Virago! Vance Weston is a bit insufferable and various alternate titles suggested themselves; mainly along the lines of Portrait of the Artist as a Young (insert your own epithet). Wharton is actually wrestling with the epistemology on an artist/writer. The interplay between imagination, cognition, processes and places. The plot is simple: (spoilers for the first in the series), after Vance’s wife dies he persuades Halo to leave her husband and go to Europe with him without waiting for divorce and remarriage. Much of the book follows their perambulations around Europe. Society shuns Halo because she is still married. Vance of course is fine because he is a man and Wharton makes her point forcefully. Vance seems much more self-absorbed in this sequel: “The next morning Vance announced that he meant to spend at least a month at Cordova. He said “I mean” as naturally as if the decision concerned only himself and he would not for the world have restricted his companion’s liberty … It was not that he was forgetful of her, but that, now they were together his heart was satisfied, while the hunger of his mind was perpetual and insatiable.” There is much about the male artist/writer taking his companion/muse for granted assuming the world is centred on him and what concerns him. The tasks performed by women are taken for granted. “The mere fact that she was patient with him, didn’t nag, didn’t question, didn’t taunt, somehow added to the sense of her remoteness. Did that curious tolerance make her less woman, less warm to the touch.” One reviewer has suggested that Wharton is using the Cupid and Psyche myth in the two novels, explaining the suspicion and disenchantment. It is an interesting follow on. Not Wharton’s best but worth reading, although I did find the ending a bit irritating. 7 out of 10 Starting Loitering with Intent by Murial Spark
  25. Supporting Cast by Kit de Waal Kit de Waal is a social worker and has written about fostering and adoption. She has had a career in social care as well as in writing. Her mother was Irish and her father from the Caribbean, she was brought up in Birmingham. She is my age and so remembers like I do the signs in windows saying “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs”. She recalls: "We were the only black children at the Irish Community Centre and the only ones with a white mother at the West Indian Social Club." She has written a couple of novels. This collection of short stories feature secondary characters from the novels. I haven’t read the novels and found it no barrier to reading these stories. The themes include loneliness, cultural dislocation, thwarted desire and often important points in life like marriage, divorce, death, release from prison, children, holidays, journeys and much more. The stories themselves are often very short, sometimes a couple of pages: vignettes, just a little glimpse. These little glimpses are powerful, but the whole can feel a little dislocated. Nevertheless they are to the point and powerful and I really enjoyed them. 7 and a half out of 10 Starting The Winter Guest by W C Ryan
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